Time-Lapse Video: Building the Pitzer Cluster at the Ohio Supercomputing Center

In this video, Dell EMC specialists and CoolIT technicians build the Ohio Supercomputing Center’s newest, most efficient supercomputer system, the Pitzer Cluster. Named for Russell M. Pitzer, a co-founder of the center and emeritus professor of chemistry at The Ohio State University, the Pitzer Cluster is expected to be at full production status and available to clients in November. The new system will power a wide range of research from understanding the human genome to mapping the global spread of viruses.

The Pitzer Cluster follows the long-running HPC trend of higher performance in a smaller footprint, offering clients nearly as much performance as the center’s most powerful cluster, but in less than half the space and with less power,” said David Hudak, executive director of OSC. “This valuable new addition to our data center allows OSC to continue addressing the growing computational, storage and analysis needs of our client communities in academia, science and industry.”

The theoretical peak performance of the new Dell EMC-built cluster is about 1.3 petaflops, meaning it is capable of performing 1.3 quadrillion calculations per second. In other words, to match the potential of what the Pitzer Cluster could do in just one second, a single person would have to perform one calculation every second for 41,195,394.5 years. The cluster also can achieve seven petaflops of theoretical peak performance for mixed-precision artificial intelligence workloads.

We worked with Dell EMC to create a highly efficient, dense and flexible petaflop-class system,” said Douglas Johnson, chief systems architect at OSC. “We have designed the Pitzer Cluster with some unique components to complement our existing systems and boost our total center performance to more than 2.8 petaflops.”

The Pitzer Cluster will join existing systems on the OSC data center floor at the State of Ohio Computer Center: The Dell EMC/Intel Owens Cluster (March 2017) and the HP/Intel Ruby Cluster (April 2015). The new system will replace the HP/Intel Oakley Cluster (March 2012).

Dell EMC is thrilled to continue our great collaboration with OSC with this new dense, efficient and liquid cooled system,” said Thierry Pellegrino, vice president, Dell EMC High Performance Computing. “The Pitzer Cluster brings to bear a multitude of new technologies to help OSC and its researchers more quickly and efficiently tackle immense challenges, using artificial intelligence and deep learning to ultimately drive human progress.”

The Pitzer Cluster will utilize CoolIT Systems’ DCLC, a modular, low-pressure, rack-based cooling solution that enables a dramatic increase in rack density, component performance and power efficiency. To support the high performance requirements of the system, CoolIT’s Passive Coldplate Loop for the PowerEdge C6420 servers delivers dedicated liquid cooling to the Intel processors in each of the 256 CPU nodes, managed by a stand-alone, central pumping CHx650 Coolant Distribution Unit.

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